Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis. By Nick Bano. Verso £10.99.
The author is a tenants’ rights lawyer, and here he gives a thorough account of the rise of private landlordism in Britain, its consequences, and how he believes it can be done away with. A number of examples of cases illustrate how devastating tenants’ situations can become.
Back in the 1970s, council housing was much more widespread than now, and private landlordism appeared to be on the way out, with just seven percent of households renting privately. But under Thatcher and later governments, council housing declined and private landlordism grew. It is mainly small landlords (about 2.5 million of them) who rent homes to tenants, while corporate landlords primarily invest in commercial property. The poorest tenants may pay over half their income to landlords; as Bano puts it, poorer people transfer the bulk of their wages to better-off people for poor-quality housing.
The 1972 Housing Finance Act attacked low council rents, and more generally the state has facilitated and supported the raising of rents. Tenants find it hard, and even impossible, to resist a rent increase, rent strikes are illegal, and landlords have the legal right to make someone homeless (‘no fault’ evictions are still legal). Assured shorthold tenancies give power to the landlord, and increases in Universal Credit mean that tenants who received these benefits can pay more in rent. Some landlords even charge viewing fees so that would-be tenants can have a look at a property.
Bano supports Marx’s view that the interests of landlords are opposed to everyone else’s. Tenants want lower rents; capitalists want this too, as it means lower wages, and they also want lower commercial rent for offices etc. Residential property is an attractive form of investment, and the author refers to ‘a large petty-bourgeois rentier class’ who are ‘dependent on housing wealth’. But small landlords are not a separate class, as in most cases they still depend on wage labour to survive, even if their income is topped up by rent.
The real problem, the author says, is not the supply of housing, but its cost. Around seventy percent of housing is under-occupied (though it would have been good to have a bit more detail on this). He advocates ‘the decommodification of housing to ensure universal access and good conditions’. But this is not going to happen under capitalism, and what is needed is the ending of production for sale, not just for housing but for all goods and services, which is what socialism will mean.
Paul Bennett
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